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Communications faculty, researchers ready for active role at conference

By Steve Sampsell

July 28, 2014

Communications faculty, researchers ready for active role at conference

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Three dozen College of Communications faculty members and researchers will make presentations or serve as moderators or panelists during the annual Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in early August.

Experts from the college had 30 papers accepted for presentation and will moderate or participate in 27 separate panels during the four-day conference, scheduled Aug. 6-8, in Montreal. One submission was named Top Student Paper and a faculty member and a graduate student who recently graduated from Penn State’s doctoral program were selected for top individual awards that will be presented at the conference.

The productivity of College of Communications researchers ranks fifth among all participating programs this year. Participants and presenters this year include 17 faculty members and 19 graduate students. In the past decade, Penn State has perennially ranked among the top-10 programs with researchers presenting their work at the international conference.

Individually, Distinguished Professor S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Laboratory at Penn State, earned the Distinguished Educator Award. The award is presented each year to a faculty member who has made a significant contribution to mass communication pedagogy.

AEJMC is a nonprofit organization of more than 3,700 educators, students and practitioners from around the globe. The association’s mission is to promote the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to cultivate the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multi-cultural society in the classroom and curriculum, and to defend and maintainfreedom of communication in an effort to achieve better professional practice and a better informed public.

Founded in 1912, by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, the first president (1912-13) of the American Association of Teachers of Journalism, as it was then known, AEJMC is the oldest and largest alliance of journalism and mass communication educators and administrators at the college level.

AEJMC’s annual conference features sessions on teaching, research and public service in the various components of journalism and mass communication -- from advertising and public relations to electronic and online journalism to media management and newspapers. Pre-convention workshops deal with teaching advertising, media ethics issues, incorporating diversity in the curriculum, teaching media management and teaching visual communication.